TURDA SALT MINE

TURDA SALT MINE IS ”THE COOLEST UNDERGROUND PLACE IN THE WORLD ”

The Turda Salt Mine (Salina Turda) has been in use since antiquity. The Romans most likely got their salt from there after they conquered Dacia. Although the deposits are plentiful, salt mining was stopped there in 1932. When I say they’re plentiful, I mean the salt deposits run underground from Turda to Dej and go as deep as 2,600 meters. They’re barely scratching the surface in the Turda and Dej Salt Mines.

You enter the mine through a tunnel that stretches about 300 meters.On the walls, the meters are marked with inscriptions.After walking through the tunnel for what seems like a looooong time, you finally reach the inside of the salt mine, where everything is solid salt (the floor, the walls and the ceiling).

In one of the halls, the machine used to mine the salt, called a salt scraper, is on display. Initially, it was powered by men, then by horses. It would scrape horizontally and vertically.

Salt would then be loaded onto iron carts and pushed outside.

One thing you notice right away is how corroded all the metal is. Inside a salt mine, it’s to be expected. For some reason, fir wood holds up in that terribly salty environment very well, so it’s used everywhere for structural support and functional purposes.

The texture of the walls ranges from pure, translucent crystal to what we know as salt, little white crystals that can be scraped off with our fingernails.

After you ascend on the staircase shown above, you enter a lower hall where one of the walls does not exist. You walk to the edge and lo and behold, you find yourself centimeters away from a vertigo-inducing precipice. It’s a vertical drop at least 150 meters down and before you have a chance to recover from that shock, you see this otherworldly appearance.

At first it seems like a spaceship parked there. Then you realize it’s an underground lake with a manmade island and wooden structures, artistically lit.

So you look around to see how you can get down there and you see this.

The solid salt walls are carved straight down, as a ravine, and they open up into a huge

underground hall filled with all sorts of playgrounds.

There are elevators to ferry you up and down but the lines are long, so we took the stairs. On the walls, the years in which those levels were reached are marked with inscriptions.

On the walls, delicate salt stalactites had begun to form, as a result of the water condensation generated by all the visiting crowds.

As amazing as the Turda Salt Mine looks today, with its huge vertical drops downward on solid salt walls, just imagine how it would look if they’d mine the whole 2,600 meters and you’d actually look down that entire drop. It would be deeply frightening and amazing and otherworldly and spectacular, even more so than it already is.

Unfortunately there are no hotels at this location at the moment.

Unfortunately there are no self-catering offers at this location at the moment.

Unfortunately there are no tour offers at this location at the moment.